Neil Young had a nice warm-up, but now it seems the streaming services will have to deal with a slightly bigger problem – Kenya West. The modern cluster man announced last weekend that his upcoming album “Donda 2” will not be available to listen to on Spotify, Apple or YouTube (poor diezer, no one counts them). Instead, if you want to hear Kenya West lick Jesus you will have to buy the player His dedicated, the Stem Player he launched last year along with his previous album, “Donda” first to his name. Kenya has managed to present a handsome achievement, at least economically.
Three days after Kenya published the news of the album’s exclusivity, he reported that about 10,000 units of the player had been sold for $ 200 each. In a quick calculation, this is about two million dollars in three days. For the sake of comparison, in a very rough estimate, in order to earn a similar amount from Spotify, the songs on the album had to reach about 840 million listens. Currently, his most balanced song on Spotify, “Ni ** as In Paris”, stands at 820 million listens, and even in it the royalties are divided between him and Jay-Z. So the numbers presented by Kenya are undoubtedly impressive, and his decision to give up the small (relatively, all-relative) money that comes to artists from streaming services has proven to be wise for him. This is true even after West said that Apple Music had offered him a sum of $ 100 million to get the exclusive rights to the album. “It has nothing to do with money,” he said last weekend, “it has to do with power.”
There’s just one more small problem – any musician who does not call himself Kenya West. While the vision is impressive and the intention is certainly right, it is a solution that works great for an artist of this magnitude, who can build muscle on the streaming and offer the audience a direct line to connect to, but more challenging for artists of a smaller size. With all our love for her, who will buy a Noga Erez player? Probably just Uri Russo.
The player is of course mostly a symbol, since on a technical level this is not a breakthrough they are trying to hunt – a round player with a built-in speaker that fits in the palm of the hand is cute, although kids with a JBL speaker do not really care if the music comes from the player or glands. The only exclusive feature, other than capturing “Donda 2”, is its channel separation capability. That is, you can play any song through the player (not just Kenya), and use it to separate the different playing channels: singing, drums, bass and the rest. It’s a cute ploy with interesting potential when it comes to listener participation in music and mash-up culture, but that’s the magic. A cute gimmick, but a gimmick. There are other small features like loop, reverb and all sorts of words that excite only producers, but it’s not something you can add to any basic and free sound editing tool.
West is neither the first nor the last to try to challenge the musical monopoly of streaming services in the last decade, when in most cases the solution boils down to a very simple act – an almost direct transfer of money from the listener to the artist, usually for one reward or another. For Kenya the reward is the player and the right to hear a new album, for Patrion it’s complementary content, for Bandcamp it’s some audio files (and especially the pride you donated) and for Only Pans, well, don’t ask. It’s just that everyone relies mostly on the good will of the listeners, which is not necessarily something that is easy to rely on. The payment culture in post-piracy music is still lacking, and the NIS 19.90 you pay to Spotify doesn’t really help. So no, this player will not solve this problem, but hey, at least he tried.